In many countries, operators and Internet service providers are obliged by legal requirements to provide traffic data, including stored data, and content of communications generated from public telecommunications and Internet services for specific target subscribers based on request from Authorities (Law Enforcement Agencies) for the purpose of detection, investigation and prosecution of crime and criminal offences, including terrorism.
These requirements have already been met by methods and systems that allow lawful interception of a target in a variety of 3GPP telecommunication networks, i.e. telecommunications networks covered by 3GPP standards.
Initiatives within the European Union (EU) regulate the legal basis for data retention. For instance, the EU Parliament adopted a set of amendments that approved the Council's proposed directive on data retention (Directive 2006/24/EC). In this directive, initial requirements and how an extension of the directive will be handled are described. Consequently, an essential part of operator's effort to comply with current legislation is to secure that processes and tools can be adapted to handle an expansion of the scope for data retention.
Technical specification ETSI DTS/LI-00039 gives guidance for the delivery and associated issues of retained data of telecommunications and subscribers. In particular, such specification provides a set of requirements relating to Handover Interfaces for the retained traffic data and subscriber data by law enforcement and other authorized requesting authorities. Technical Specification ETSI DTS/LI-00033 contains handover requirements and a handover specification for the data that is identified in EU Directive 2006/24/EU on retained data.
In the ever ongoing process of integrating heterogeneous communications networks and protocols, 3GPP is now specifying an Evolved Packet System (EPS), which allows to use some IETF protocols for motility such as Proxy Mobile Internet Protocol v6, whose functional architecture and related protocols are defined in the draft IETF “Proxy Mobile IPv6”. To this purpose, 3GPP specifies in TS 23.402 “Architecture enhancements for non-3GPP Accesses (Release 8)” an architecture that allows using PMIPv6 protocols and non-3GPP terminals to use a 3GPP network to get services from operators.
Clearly, each operator using a 3GPP based network is still required to satisfy legal and regulatory requirements for targets that may include non-3GPP terminals, in accordance with the 3GPP standard Lawful Interception architecture defined in 3GPP TS 33.107 “3G Security; Lawful Interception Architecture and Functions (Release 8)”.
Unfortunately, the existing Lawful Interception solutions for 3GPP network architectures do not cover the case in which mobility of the terminal is handled by the use of IETF protocols such as Proxy Mobile Internet Protocol v6 (PMIPv6).
The case in which a non-3GPP access is used to get telecommunication services from a 3GPP network is not covered, either.